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Monday, April 4, 2016

Regime Change Refugees On the Shores of Europe

Vijay Prashad

Terrible
pictures were posted on social media of refugees from Syria and elsewhere,
washed up on the shores of Europe. One, in particular, is especially ghastly –
the picture of the body of young Aylan Kurdi lying on the beach. He was only
three. He was from the Syrian town of Kobane, now made famous as the frontline
of the battle between ISIS and the Kurdish militias (largely the YPG and PKK).
Aylan Kurdi's body lay in a fetal position. Few dry eyes could turn away from
that photograph.

The
Jordanian cartoonist Rafat Alkhateeb drew an image of Aylan Kurdi. The infant's
body lies on the other side of a barbed wire fence that separates him from the
continents of the world.

Children
like Aylan Kurdi are disposable in the world's imagination. Untold thousands of
Syrian children have died in this conflict. Tens of thousands of children have
died in conflicts around the world. The United Nations estimates that half of
all deaths in conflict zones are of children. In 1995, UNICEF reported that two
million children died in conflicts over the previous decade. The rate has not
decreased. The statistic harms the consciousness. But it is the picture of
Aylan Kurdi that has unsettled our ethics – does the world really care about
the damage done to children as a result of war and diabolical trade policies?
The evidence suggests that the world does not care at all. What care there is
comes in the brief instance when we glance at a photograph such as that of the
dead body of Aylan Kurdi. He breaks our heart. But he will do little to change
our politics.

The West
believes that it is acceptable for it to intervene to influence the political
economy of the Third World – to force IMF-driven “reforms” on these states.
Capital is allowed to be borderless. That freedom does not apply to labour – to
people. Migration is forbidden. It is hateful. Racist ideas allow fortresses to
be built against the natural movement of people. Barbed wire fences and
concentration camp towers outline the US-Mexico border, just as such fences and
the Mediterranean Moat block the passage into Europe. If the Capital destroys
the society here, its people cannot be allowed to migrate there.

The West
believes that it is acceptable for it to overthrow governments and bomb its
enemies in the lands of the Third World. It sees this as the limit of its
humanitarianism. It calls this humanitarian interventionism or, in the language
of the UN, “responsibility to protect” (R2P). When it breaks states, as it did
in Libya, the West takes no responsibility for the broken lives of the people
in those zones. Bombs are borderless. But war refugees must stand in queues and
be held in concentration camps. They are not allowed freedom of movement.

Hypocrisy is
central to elite Western ethics. It uses words like “freedom” and “equality”
but mostly means its opposite. The freedom of human beings and equality between
human beings is not relevant. More important is the freedom of Money. It is
Money that cannot have its liberty impinged.

Both Europe
and the United States want to build walls to prevent the free movement of
people. The Statue of Liberty in New York harbor bears the words: “Give me your
tired, your poor; your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” This is Emma
Lazarus' poem from 1883. No longer do these words make sense. There is no
exhortation to send the tired, the poor, the huddled masses to safety. There is
mostly the State-led jingoism that sets up barriers and threatens deportations.
The more appropriate song is by Woody Guthrie, Deportee, from 1961: “They chase
us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves. We died in your hills, we died in
your deserts, we died in your valleys and died on your plains.” He would have
added, we died on your shores.

Such toxic lineages are not alone. There is also the people's ethics –
banners in Germany unfurled at football games to welcome refugees, convoys of
ordinary British nations to Calais (France) to help feed and clothe the
refugees, demonstrations of radical internationalists in Eastern Europe against
the neo-fascists and the racists. There are also, in the United States, the
Dream Defenders and United We Dream who fight for undocumented residents, who
formed part of the massive pro-immigrant rallies that have now adopted May Day
as their day. These indications of the good side of history are often ignored
by the press, which has a tendency to hype up the bad side to boost ratings.
Such gestures of solidarity tell us what is possible in the West.

Aylan Kurdi is dead. Many other Aylan Kurdis remain. Our outrage at this
callous death should drive us deeper into a politics that calls for a drawdown
of the violence in Syria and for a serious peace process in Libya that forces
us to be resolute in our fight against IMF and NATO destruction of societies
and states. In essence, this is a call for a resolute anti-imperialism.
Imperialism, after all, is an extra-economic force such as war or the unequal
drafting of trade rules to allow a small capitalist minority to sequester the
largest share of globally produced social wealth. Refugees such as Aylan Kurdis
are “climate change refugees,” “regime change refugees” and “IMF refugees.”

The West's managers will only talk about tragedies and security. For them,
people are migrants and deportees, those whose mobility must be constrained.
This is a limited imagination. They will not want to talk about the causes of
the problem – the wars and economic policies that throw millions of people into
the status of refugee. That is our job. In the name of Aylan Kurdi.

The writer is Director of International Studies at Trinity College and the
Editor of “Letters to Palestine” (Verso). He lives in Northampton.